“I should know about shearing sheep.” He started rolling up his sleeves. “After all, the duchy has a lot of sheep. I should have some experience to report back to John MacNaughton.”
“Ye should know about sheep?”
Good God, the man’s forearms were things of beauty to match his face. Golden hair glinting in the sun. Long ropes of muscle. Veins popping into relief as the muscles in one forearm flexed when he rolled the sleeve on the other side.
What would it be like to run her hands over those arms? To feel those surely soft hairs under her fingertips, to sense the power of that muscle?
“Yes.”
Oh, he had said something to her. “Yes.” But what had she said to him to provoke that “yes”?
“You’re going to teach me how to wash a sheep, Helen.”
“Yer going to get filthy, Jack Pike.”
He leered. “I’m already filthy or hadn’t you heard?”
“But that nice shirt.” She gulped. “Those tight breeches.”
“You’ve been looking at the tightness of my breeches?”
“Aye. Ye know I have. Is nae the reason for the tightness? So I and other women will look?”
He seemed taken aback. “Er, yes.”
“And I’ve been looking at yer arms and yer hair, too.”
“My hair?”
“’Tis the same color as mine when I was young.”
“You’re young now, Helen.”
“Nae. I’m nae young, stupid man. The sun is high. Let’s wash a sheep.”
They started off with him holding the ewe, her scrubbing the fleece. He was not helpful at first, his boots sliding on the rocks, his hands scrabbling for purchase on the yolk-covered wool. Finally, he settled on being at the sheep’s head, sitting on his buttocks in the stream with his legs splayed out, holding onto the rope around the neck of the sheep, and every once in a while using one of his hands to splash some water on the sheep’s head.
“Ye dinnae need to do that, Jack. ’Tis the fleece back here that’s important.”
“But the sheep look so much better with their faces clean, don’t they?”
That made her laugh. And his groans when he would sit back down in the icy water.
“My bollocks have climbed so far up into my body, Helen, I don’t think they’ll ever come down again.”
They switched occasionally to give his “bits a chance to warm up,” as he put it, but Jack did not scrub the fleeces as well as she did and she had to come behind him with her own hands to get the rest of the dirt off.
After ten sheep, his shirt was soaked and dirty and his sleeves were unrolled and flapping down and getting in his way.
He stood up. He stretched. He took his shirt off over his head.
Helen gasped. Silently, she hoped. The wet shirt had been dangerous enough, revealing the shape of his shoulders and his chest and his back.
But now . . . now. She trembled.
She looked away.
She heard his voice. “That’s better.”
